Seagate becomes first to ship massive 8TB hard drive

In a press release on the matter, Seagate vice president of marketing, Scott Horn, pointed out that as our world becomes more mobile, the number of devices we use to create and consume data is driving an explosive growth in unstructured data.

This places increased pressure on cloud builders to look for innovative ways to build cost-effective, high capacity storage for both private and cloud-based data centers, he added. The new 8TB solution aims to do just that with its massive amount of capacity stuffed inside a standard 3.5-inch drive.

Seagate tells us the drive is built using fewer components for increased system and staffing efficiencies while lowering power costs but unfortunately the flow of details end there. As such, we have no idea at this time how many platters are involved, the spindle speed, or whether or not it uses Seagate's Shingled Magnetic Recording technology.

Announced nearly a year ago, this technology takes advantage of blank "guard space" between individual tracks in order to increase capacity without increasing the number of platters in a drive. Because of this, some rewriting will still need to occur which could impact performance.

Seagate is shipping 8TB drives to select customers starting today with wide scale availability set for next quarter.